The Toronto Star Is Cracking 300,000 Newsletter Subscribers; Up Next? It Wants a Million
The Toronto Star’s about to crack 300,000 subscribers for its flagship newsletter, First Up, and it’s now eyeing 1 million.
“I don’t think there’s any reason why First Up couldn’t have a million people signed up for it. Toronto’s got enough people in it, and we serve Toronto and Ontario well enough that I think we should be reaching that many people,” David Topping, director of newsletters, at Torstar Corporation, told AMO. “It’s a good newsletter, and the people who don’t know about it yet would like it if they got it… A part of this is just exposing it to people who don’t realize that they need what we’re offering.”
Why are newsletters so important to publishers? Digital subscribers are half as likely to cancel if they received at least one of our email offerings, according to Topping.
The number of subscribers to the Star has been ramping up quickly lately (read: 297,000 on Thursday, up to 298,000 on Friday last week) thanks to a number of different strategies including website overlays, promotional emails (eg, ‘Hey, are you interested in the next update on this story? Go ahead and sign up for these alerts here.’) and making signing up as frictionless as possible.
The Greater Toronto Area has a population of about 6.7 million people. At the start of 2022, First Up had 135,633 subscribers. Part of the quick growth to 300,000 since then has been a result of paid marketing, which was halted in mid-2023—something Topping would like to see reimplemented at some point given the strong results.
Other ways to grow could include cross promotion with other newsletters like the CBC News Morning Brief, run by Canada’s public broadcaster, or other publishers whose audiences might be potential subscribers.
“We think a million is realistic,” Topping said. “We do not have an established target here around exactly when we want to hit that by.”
Too Many Newsletters
When Topping started at the Star in 2018, there were a lot of newsletters that were very oriented around subject matter like books, travel and film. There were also morning, lunchtime, afternoon and evening newsletters, as well as breaking news alerts.
“The short of it is that we had too many; even then there was a pretty big gap between the top performing and bottom performing newsletters,” Topping said. Some of the newsletters had low subscriber numbers and weren’t driving traffic to the site, or subscriptions.
So they nixed the low performers and focused on the high performers—like First Up, then called Morning Headlines—for which they hired a dedicated writer and editor. That relaunched in April 2020, a bad time for humanity and a great time for digital media.
The newsletters that resonate at the Star tend to serve a purpose and an audience, Topping said. They are not simply sections of the paper—like real estate or investigations.
For example, rather than a general holiday food newsletter during the season, the Star produces a holiday email with a cookie recipe every day from December 1 to 24, and the newsroom actually bakes them. The idea was to move away from being broad to honing in on something that’s much easier to understand.
Another example is the medals newsletter, published only during the Olympics, and the alerts go out any time Canada gets a medal.
“We get a ton of traffic from that every Olympics, because at least for almost everybody I know in Canada, the thing you want to know is, did we just get a medal and in what?” Topping said. “If we had a generic Olympics newsletter, I don’t actually think it would have done nearly as well.”
The better defined the purpose of the newsletter, the better it’s likely to perform—and the themes will probably cross topics. Yet another successful example of a Star newsletter is the investigation alert for the unsolved murders of billionaire Barry Sherman and his wife Honey in 2017. That goes out any time the author, Kevin Donovan, puts out a story, and there’s no set timeline to it, meaning months can pass between stories.
Topping said they haven’t exhausted all avenues for growth, and for the most part, newsletter and email alert subscriptions have grown largely via email marketing, asking people if they want to sign up.
With promotional website overlays, promotional emails and registration options upon subscribing, “they’re all very powerful, and they can add a lot of people either always perpetually, in the case of an overlay, or with subscribers and registrants being added, or in bulk, which is like a promotional campaign.”
Topping said:
There’s probably room for us to be even more aggressive on our website with how we get people signed up, and also how easy it is to get signed up as well, like we switched from promotional emails that took you to our signup page to ones that you could just click a button and instantly be added to the newsletter. And even cutting that friction dramatically improved how well it performed… We’re not near the ceiling yet… people keep signing up for this thing, and they keep engaging with it, and we keep converting them.
